Category Archives: Spanish KS4

In line with my earlier post on GCSE listening skills for the AQA examination, I am posting examples of question types for the reading exam. Popular questions types are “question and answer” where you need to understand the question being asked as well as the response – these usually take the form of questions based on a questionnaire; Present/Past/Future identification; and gap fill where grammatical awareness as well as vocabulary knowledge are key. In line with the listening exam, students need to be aware of distractors, synonyms, word families and negatives as well as skills such as inference and understanding that the answer may not be a word in the text.

When working on literary texts I have also been using song lyrics as well as poetry. The benefit of song lyrics is that you will often get an accompanying video which provides a wealth of cultural references. Attached is a worksheet relating to part of the lyrics to Rosalia’s Malamente.

If you follow the AQA GCSE board, the following may be of use. I have put together similar exercises from all of the GCSE higher listening materials we have to date. There are some types of exercise that are repeated e.g. news item comprehension, past/present/future, inference, etc. I have grouped them together and I will be working through them soon with my group. Strategies like looking out for distractors are well known, but inference esp. answering when the words are not provided are more difficult and need some practice. The fact that similar exercise types have appeared in all papers so far is no guarantee that this will happen this summer, but the strategies in coping with distractors, tenses, inference, answering in the target language etc. will still be there.

When using the resources, the transcript part should be hidden. I’m getting the students to fold the paper.

The resources attached are from a lesson I taught recently. The topic was “Festivals” and I have been working towards a Higher Level GCSE 150 word writing task where one of the bullet points asks the students to write about a festival they would like to take part in.

There was a listening activity in the PowerPoint which I have deleted as it was based on audio from VIVA. I used the transcript to create an activity where the students heard the audio, but my transcript had replaced many words with synonyms and other verbs taken from the High Level Verbs sheet.

The lesson was taught a few days before the Day of the Dead in Mexico, hence the reference in the PowerPoint.

The attached documents highlight the core language students need to know in order to function well when producing Spanish independently. I think there is work to be done to adapt some of the attached documents to the requirements of Higher Level GCSE – I made them last year with lower sets in mind. This will be a task for me in the coming weeks.

The attached documents are just ideas. The key thing for me is continually revisiting the language in lessons especially expressions which continually trip up students such as “tampoco”, question words and expressions such as “acabar de”.

I’m posting a few documents I use regularly for translation (into and from Spanish). The formats can be used for all translation tasks – I just change the text. For the “select the best translation” task, a bit more work is required. The assessment criteria are those used by AQA.